Battleship is a board game for children, so it stands to reason that a film adaptation would
also be aimed at kids.Did it need to be made for really dumb kids, though?

Halfway through the bloated slog of a movie, the most undemanding 10-year-old will think about
sneaking out and switching theaters to catch the end of
The Avengers again.

The only people who seem to be making an effort in
Battleship are the special-effects crews — particularly the sound mixers, who must have
racked up serious overtime coming up with cool whirs and booms and noises to accompany an
extraterrestrial invasion of Earth.

Battleship was directed by Peter Berg, who is not without talent (having made
The Rundown,
The Kingdom and
Friday Night Lights). He shows the proper awe and respect for the superb
computer-generated creations: He holds on shots long enough to allow you to take in the details of
the spacecraft and their weapons (with the missiles shaped like the white and red pegs used in the
board game).

And he shows you the stuff you want to see early on — including an extended look at the aliens,
which resemble a cross between lizards and ZZ Top.

Yet he also succumbs to the visual bombast that has become the unfortunate norm in action
pictures: Every shot in
Battleship, even those in which people are just talking, looks like a glitzy,
hyper-stylized beer commercial.

Worse, Berg pays no attention to the drive and logic of his narrative. Characters appear and
disappear without explanation.

The problem with movies such as
Battleship is that they corrupt and derail promising careers. Each of Berg’s movies has
been bigger and costlier than the one before, and, now that he has had a taste of blockbuster
success (Hancock earned more than $600 million, and
Battleship has already grossed $215 million overseas), he is unlikely to return to
smaller, more challenging filmmaking.

On the plus side, Berg cast several real-life soldiers in supporting roles — including Gregory
D. Gadson, an honored veteran who lost his legs in the Iraq war.In the lead role of a Navy
lieutenant, however, Taylor Kitsch — who leads the charge against the baddies — runs around even
more than he did in
John Carter.

And then there’s Liam Neeson.If you’ve seen the ads for
Battleship, you might think Neeson is in the movie. But his 10-minute appearance as an
admiral is little more than an extended cameo.